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IN CLASSROOMS DEALING with traumatic histories of injustice or with the troubling violence and inequities that continue to mark everyday life in this new millennium, guilt often surfaces, persistently and indelibly, as a relation between the stories of suffering being retold and those who listen to their retelling. The fact that guilt is so commonplace in accounts of classroom encounters dealing with social justice issues (e.g., the Holocaust, racial injustices, and homelessness) raises numerous questions regarding how students and teachers understand guilt as a relation between one’s sense of moral responsibility and the suffering experienced by others. Indeed, a primary question for me concerns the ways in which teachers—like myself— who bring such stories (e.g., newspaper articles on homelessness, accounts of institutional racism, biographical material on the Holocaust) into the classroom for their “pedagogical” value are doing so in order to influence students’ attitudes in a particular direction, optimally seeking to shape a more complex understanding of social responsibility. Because of the presence of such a desire—indeed, demand—to touch and shape another’s life in this way, these pedagogical strategies and the responses they incite require a careful consideration not only of what it is we hope to do but what the actual effects of our educational encounters produce. Admittedly, the responses to stories of suffering can be as varied as the students who listen to them; however, I wish to focus on guilt here, because it is the one kind of response whose frequency is met with apprehension and even hostility on the part of educators. Unlike empathy, or even love, guilt is a kind of response that is seen to represent a pedagogical failure of sorts, for guilt is not generally held to be morally or politically productive, and certainly it is 91 FOUR STRANGELY INNOCENT? GUILT, SUFFERING, AND RESPONSIBILITY not viewed as having much educational value. Yet the significance of guilt it seems to me lies in its tacit acknowledgment that some harm has been committed against another, for which one feels some kind of obligation, whether or not one has been directly involved in such harm.1 What I am particularly interested in exploring here are two questions that open up a possibility for considering guilt as having pedagogical and ethical significance. First, what makes us susceptible to guilt in listening to stories of suffering in the first place? That is, why is guilt such a common response to being exposed to another’s suffering? Second, how might we think about responsibility—both teachers’ and students’—in light of such susceptibility and guilt? For instance, to what degree do students’ guilty responses provoke a sense of responsibility toward people who suffer, and what responsibilities do educators have in the context of these student expressions of guilt? In response, I offer a close reading of two views of guilt, both of which speak directly to its ethical significance in the context of how each of us engages with suffering that is not our own. Melanie Klein focuses on the role that our earliest feelings of love and aggression play in guilt, and she views guilt as a necessary feature of the moral work of making reparation. Klein’s work reminds us that this moral work is a psychical event, rooted in a particular set of relations from one’s empirical past that has an impact on how we encounter suffering in our classrooms in the present. Emmanuel Levinas’s writing concerns itself less with an empirical past and more with considering how our “pre-originary” openness to the Other gestures ethically toward an unknowable future. In doing so, Levinas draws attention to the metaphysical aspects of guilt and susceptibility, and how these give rise to an inevitable responsibility . Levinas’s work allows us to read our classroom encounters with suffering as formative to responsibility. As in all the chapters, there is a definite theoretical incommensurability between the two views under study. Yet I am reading them here in tension with each other to frame our attention to guilt as a complex ethical formation that involves the subject inescapably in both a psychical history and a metaphysical dimension. Together, these dual aspects of guilt highlight why it is that guilt needs to be attended to. GUILT AS A PEDAGOGICAL PROBLEM There are many ways in which guilt structures students’ response to what Levinas refers to as the “uselessness” of suffering, that is, the absolutely unnecessary nature of another’s suffering.2 When...

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